He was known for the famous cartoon "The Gerry-Mander", published in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812, which led to the coining of the term gerrymandering.

His father ran a wagon shop in Lebanon before moving to New York City in 1794, and Elkanah probably worked for him as a carriage painter.

Some sources say that he met Benjamin Trott in 1798, and the two friends left New York and stayed in Albany for a few months to avoid an epidemic of yellow fever.

[3] Some of Tisdale's earliest works were his full-page illustrations in John Trumbull's McFingal, which was published in New York in 1795.

According to David McNeely Stauffer in his American Engravers on Copper and Steel, "Tisdale worked in both line and stipple; but his plates possess little merit ... Tisdale was a better designer than engraver, and he claimed to be a painter in his early life, though his best work was in the line of miniature portrait painting.